John Carter, a faithful adaptation of a classic science fiction book by the
visionary Edgar Rice Burroughs fails to impress.

Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom novels have been so thoroughly strip-mined for ideas by science-fiction cinema that their key motifs — human soldiers leading alien uprisings, mystical artefacts cached in forgotten tombs, alien princesses with a fondness for metal swimwear — are already firmly ensconced in the modern moviegoer’s imagination.

Unfortunately, it’s for this very reason that this respectful adaptation of Burroughs’s 1917 book A Princess Of Mars, directed by the former Pixar animator Andrew Stanton, feels less like a revival of a classic saga than a rip-off twice removed. Almost everything on screen is old hat, and the few details that have remained fresh for the past 100 years haven’t been imitated for good reason.

The film begins with a hasty expositional voiceover that feels very much like a sop to nervous producers: it’s the polar opposite of the slow, teasing reveal Stanton employed in Wall-E, his wonderful second film for Pixar; and worse still, it’s filled with jargon that will be incomprehensible to anyone who has not already sat through the movie.

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We then see a villainous Dominic West taking delivery of a laser gun from a bald alien in a dressing gown, played by Mark Strong. West introduces himself as Sab Than, Prince of Zodanga, and two hours of this suddenly starts to seem like a very long time indeed.

Things are more promising back on Earth, where we’re introduced to Carter (Taylor Kitsch) twice, firstly as a recently deceased treasure hunter who has bequeathed his diary to one Edgar Burroughs, his nephew. As Edgar reads the diary — a neat framing device that sets up a genuinely gripping payoff at the movie’s end — we meet Carter again, 13 years earlier, as a gold prospector dodging the Civil War draft.

The earthbound opening act offers Kitsch his only real chance to flesh out his blank-slate hero: the boisterous humour and sense of spectacle here calls to mind John Ford at his most crowd-pleasing, and the glorious 3D panoramas of Carter galloping across the Arizona desert are more thrilling than any of the pixelated pomp that follows.

Unfortunately, thanks to a chance encounter with another bald alien in a dressing gown, Carter is then whisked off to Mars, where things go downhill fast. Here he falls in with the Tharks, a race of four-armed aliens whose chief, Tars Tarkas, is played in motion capture by Willem Dafoe. Technically, the Tharks are on a par with the blue, cat-like Na’vi from James Cameron’s Avatar (a film whose entire plot was cribbed from Burroughs’s work), but they’re almost preternaturally hard to root for: Tarkas comes across much like a 15ft Ed Miliband with tusks and a spear.

With the help of Dejah Thoris, a princess from one of two more human-like tribes engaged in their own civil war, Carter embarks on a mission to find an ancient power source that could, for unspecified reasons, end the conflict. Poor Lynn Collins, forever garbling gobbledegook about “ninth ray isolates”, tries her best to give the princess some dignity but, much like Ciaran Hinds, who plays her grandfather in a bleach-blond boy-band wig and ostrich-feather shoulder pads, this is not a role to which dignity comes easily.

In the shapeless adventuring that follows, Stanton frequently proves that he’s more than up to the task: a battle sequence peppered with cuts to an earlier tragedy proves that he can shoot action with an emotional hook, and the grand Martian cityscapes have the no-expense-spared appeal of a mid-century biblical epic. The problem is, it’s the task itself that is at fault.

Perhaps uniquely, John Carter is a film that is necessarily bad: in doing justice to Burroughs’s creation, Stanton has made a movie that is a technical marvel, but is also armrest-clawingly hammy and painfully dated. This is a vision of the future that belongs in the past.